I Always Wanted to Fly: America's Cold War Airmen

16. Yellowbird

Chapter 16 Yellowbird The Air Force’s most effective truck killers were the AC-119 and AC-130 gunships, the B-57, a few C-123s equipped with special detection devices, and the A-26. Carl Berger, ed., The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia I had many harrowing experiences in my three years there, but I kept extending. I liked the flying. When I left, I had more combat time in the B-57 than anybody else, 450 missions or something like that, many of them night interdiction in Route Packs 1 and 2 and in Laos. On my party suit I had a patch that read ‘‘Laotian Highway Patrol.’’ Ed Rider, B-57 pilot Major Fred E. ‘‘Ed’’ Rider Distinguished Flying Cross (3), Air Medal (23) Ed was born in 1937 in a farmhouse somewhere in the rural Alabama countryside. There were mules and cotton and not much else for him to remember, except for the airplanes he occasionally saw flying overhead . ‘‘I was fascinated every time one came over my house,’’ Ed said, 323 Vietnam, 1965 his eyes shining brightly. ‘‘I used to draw airplanes when I was a kid. I thought at times, ‘Maybe someday I can fly an airplane.’ But then I had no idea how I would learn to fly. I remember reading stories about zeppelins dropping bombs on England in World War I. I dreamed about them at night. In 1953 I read about dogfights between F-86 Sabre Jets and Chinese MiGs in Korea. I was having trouble staying in college because I didn’t have any money, so I joined the air force. It took six years before I made it to pilot training. I worked on B-57 bombers as an electronics technician. A captain who took a liking to me occasionally took me along on a test hop and let me take the controls if it was a dual-control model. It was fun to fly the plane. I was good at it. He encouraged me to go to OCS and then to pilot training. I followed his advice. I was high enough in my class to get any fighter I wanted, but I found out they didn’t get much flying time, so I stayed in ATC. I wanted to fly. In five years in ATC I racked up 3,300 flying hours in T-33, T-37, and T-38 jet trainers. I loved every minute of it. ‘‘By 1965 I was tired of the place and volunteered for Vietnam duty. An ATC general came to speak to us on personnel policies. During the question-and-answer period, I put up my hand. When I was recognized , I said to him, ‘Every month, I fill out a form volunteering for Vietnam. Every month my commander throws it in the wastepaper basket. Why is that?’ It got deathly quiet in the room. The general said, ‘You and your commander see me afterwards.’ We did. I got reassigned, and so did my commander. I went to Kansas to some National Guard base to get a transition check into the B-57, the type of airplane I worked on as an airman. From there I went to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I was assigned to the 8th Tactical Bomb Squadron, the Yellowbirds. Our sister squadron was the 13th, the Redbirds. The 8th and the 13th rotated back and forth to Da Nang. The 8th was at Da Nang when I arrived. I sat around the squadron building for about a week, and no one offered to train me or even took notice of me. One Friday afternoon, somebody came into the ready room looking for someone to fly the courier to Vietnam. I said I’d go. He said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I just got here, and I am sitting around doing nothing,’ I replied, 324 Yellowbird ‘so I might as well fly to Vietnam and do something.’ He said, ‘You can’t go. You don’t know what’s going on yet.’ But he couldn’t find anybody else. It was Friday afternoon, and everybody was looking forward to the weekend. So he came back and said, ‘OK, you’re it. Go see the sergeant. He’ll cut you some orders. In Saigon go to this hotel on Tudo Street. Our guys have rooms there, and they’ll tell you what to do.’ ‘‘I...